Perspective: The Bolton nomination

JULES WITCOVERSyndicated Columnist

Published Tuesday, April 19, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the nomination of outspoken United Nations critic John R. Bolton to be American ambassador to the U.N. have brought into focus two opposing notions of the role the post requires.

The Bush administration's view is that the U.S. ambassador should be a head-knocker who strongly believes the world organization needs extensive reform and won't spare sensitivities in achieving it. The other view is that the American ambassador, in light of the deep divisions driven between the United States and major Security Council members over Iraq, should be a fence-mender whose strong suit is diplomacy.

Bolton's track record and public comments on the U.N., repeatedly cited by Democratic foes on the committee, clearly recommend him in terms of the first view.

A videotape of a speech he made in 1994 to a world federalist group, ordered up by critical Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, showed him declaring among other things that "there is no United Nations," and saying if 10 floors of the U.N. building in New York were lost, it wouldn't matter.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the ranking committee Democrat, noted that some Republicans might equate sending Bolton to the U.N. with former fiercely anti-Communist President Richard M. Nixon going to China, but to Biden it was "more like sending a bull into a china shop."

One Republican committee member, Sen. George Allen of Virginia, said Bolton's very reputation as a harsh U.N. critic with a take-no-prisoners manner was exactly what the situation required.

The second view of the U.N. ambassador's job as a restorer of the United States as a credible diplomatic partner in the world body was voiced by a freshman senator who by tradition is supposed to be seen and not heard.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois cited as the model for a U.N. ambassador his fellow Illinoisan Adlai E. Stevenson II during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

Obama said Stevenson's presentation of the photographic evidence of the Soviet Union's missiles on the island, combined with his own "integrity and credibility," had convincingly made the case against the Soviet Union's bold gamble.

Stevenson came to that presentation as a firm believer in the United Nations as a necessary instrument of diplomacy and a skilled practitioner of the negotiating craft, in contrast to Bolton's father-knows-best attitude.

Any U.S. ambassador to the U.N. today faces the task of convincing other members that President Bush's questioning of its "relevance" in the run-up to his invasion of Iraq no longer applies.

Bolton in his testimony low-balled his earlier anti-U.N. remarks, saying at one point he made them to the world federalist group just to get its attention.

Throughout, he offered himself as a proponent of tough love toward the U.N., with an emphasis on the "tough."

A former State Department official, Carl W. Ford Jr., called him a bully and a "serial abuser" of subordinates.

There is more in the argument against Bolton, however, than his temperament and quick tongue.

The committee Democrats are exploring whether, as Ford charged, Bolton tried as an undersecretary of state to have an intelligence analyst removed for disputing his claim of a Cuban biological weapons program that was never proved.

At the core of the Iraq weapons of mass destruction fiasco was the failure of administration officials to challenge flawed intelligence findings. Any attempt by Bolton to punish an intelligence analyst for disagreeing with him, his critics say, should disqualify him as a credible U.S. voice at the U.N.

Personal credibility is certainly important in the job.

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had it when he made his persuasive but misleading case to the U.N. in 2002 for the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He made the sale then, but failed a second time around.

Bolton, if ever put in a similar position to sell the Security Council on an American pitch to use force to rid Iran or North Korea of alleged WMD, clearly would not be the ideal man for the job.

Even if reforming the U.N. is paramount in administration interests now, it will probably take more than tough love to achieve it.

You can respond to a Politics Today column by e-mail at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.